Empiricism would continue on to the present day. It would
become increasingly materialistic in French philosophy, culminating in
the reductionism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), wherein all
human
experience is reduced to biology, chemistry, and ultimately
physics. Rationalism, too, continues to the present day, reaching
its peak in Georges Hegel's (1770-1831) idealism of the
Absolute. Hegel held that all human activity is nothing more than
the working of the universe as it slowly and inevitably progresses
towards ultimate Godhood.

In both empiricism and rationalism (and materialism and idealism),
the human, especially the individual human person, gets lost -- either
in the eternal bumping of atoms or in the grand scheme of
God-making. Our thoughts and feelings are nothing of any
importance either way! We are just carbon molecules or the
twitchings of eternity.

Some philosophers were taken aback by this tendency, both before and
after Comte and Hegel. They felt that, for human beings, it was
our own day-to-day living that was the center of our search for the
truth. Reason and the evidence of our senses were important, no
doubt, but they mean nothing to us unless they touch our needs, our
feelings, our emotions. Only then do they acquire meaning.
This "meaning" is what the Romantic movement is all about.

I will focus on several philosophers that I believe most influenced
psychology. First is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is often
considered the father of Romanticism. And the last is Friedrich
Nietzsche, who is sometimes considered the greatest Romantic.
Afterwards, we will look at the commonalities among these philosophers
that let us talk of a Romantic Movement.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712-1778

No history of psychology is complete without a look at Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. He has influenced education to the present day,
philosophy (Kant, Schopenhauer...), political theory (the French
Revolution, Karl Marx...), and he inspired the Romantic Movement in
Philosophy, which in turn influenced all these things, and psychology,
once again.
Plus, he’s one of the most colorful characters we have and, as an added
bonus, he has left a particularly revealing autobiography in The
Confessions.

He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1712 to the watchmaker
Isaac Rousseau and his wife Suzanne Bernard Rousseau. Athough a
Calvinist, Isaac was also a bit unstable, and left his wife and first
son, returned to father Jean-Jacques, then left again. His mother
died one week after Jean-Jacques was born, and he was raised by an aunt
and uncle.

they sent him off to boarding school in the country where, he says,
he learned “all the insignificant trash that has obtained the name of
education.” The experience did, however, serve as the start of
his love-affair with rural life.

At twelve years old, he returned to his aunt and uncle. There
apprenticed to a watchmaker, he developed two other personal
qualities: The constant beatings from his master (as well as at
school) led him to lying and idleness; and adolescence led him to
develop a rather bizarre romantic streak. He would spend much of
his life falling in love.

At sixteen, he ran away from home with no money nor
possessions. A priest led him to baroness Mme de Warens, a 29
year old beauty who apparently had a soft spot for losers and potential
converts. Her influence led him to convert to Catholicism, though
he was not yet ready to give up his exhibitionism nor his desire to be
spanked by lovely ladies. He entered a seminary in 1729, but was
promptly dismissed. He eventually developed an on-again,
off-again physical relationship with the lovely Mme Warens.

In the mean time, he walked all over the countryside, often long
distances. He loved the woods, mountains, and nature
itself. He served as an occasional tutor and music teacher, but
spent much of his time reading Enlightenment authors. Voltaire’s
work turned him to a Nature worship quite congenial to his personality.

In 1742, when he was 30 years old, he left for Paris. He
quickly befriended the political writer Diderot , who managed to help
him get a job as a secretary at the French Embassy in Venice. He
was dismissed because of his insolent nature.

In 1746 he met and fell in love with Therese Levasseur, a
simple-minded laundress and seamstress. They together had four
children, all of whom were send to orphanages. Keep in mind that
that was a common response to poverty in those days (i.e. from the fall
of Rome to World War II!). He did feel considerable remorse about
it later, but admitted that he would have made a really lousy
father! No one doubts him on that.

He worked as a secretary to various aristocrats and spent quite some
time composing music. He even rewrote an operetta by Voltaire and
wrote to him. A literary contest with a monetary prize caught his
attention and, in 1750, he won with Discours sur les arts et les
sciences -- a powerful attack on civilization.

This was the first time we see his ideas about the natural goodness
of man. And although we think of him as an Enlightenment thinker,
this thesis was actually anti-Enlightenment, anti-philosophy,
anti-reason, anti-Voltaire, and even anti-printing press! The
good life, he was saying, is the simple life of the peasants.
This conception of “back to nature” involved, of course, a romanticized
notion of nature, and stands in stark contrast to the nature of jungles
and deserts!

1752 was another active year. He wrote his comedy Narcisse.
His operetta Le devin du village was successfully presented to
the King. Unfortunately, his illness -- he suffered from a
variety of painful and humiliating bladder problems -- kept him from
meeting the King, and he forfeited a pension.

In 1753, another competition was announced. Rousseau’s entry, Discourse
sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inegalite parmi les hommes,
won and was published two years later.

In this piece, he accepted biological inequalities, but argued that
there were no natural basis for any other inequalities -- economic,
political, social, or moral! These, he said, were basically due
to the existence of private property and the need to defend it with
force. Man is good, he argued, but society, which is little more
than the reification of greed, corrupts us all.

He admits that it is no longer possible for us to leave civilized
society now. It has, in fact, become a part of our nature!
The best we can do is to lead simpler lives with fewer luxuries with
the simple morality of the gospels to guide us.

In his article on economics for the Encyclopedia, he suggest
that it would help if we had a graduated income tax, a tax on luxuries
(and none on necessities), and national free public education.

In 1756, he moved with Therese and her elderly mother into “the
Hermitage,” a cottage lent to him by Mme d’Épinay. There
he wrote a novel (or “romance”) called Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise,
referring to the Heloise of Heloise and Abelard fame. It became
perhaps the most famous novel of the 1700s.

On the other side, he alienated his friends with unpleasant letters
and his rudeness towards his benefactress Mme D’Epinay. Even his
oldest friend, Diderot, called him mad. In a huff, he left the
Hermitage.

In 1762, Rousseau published both Émile and The
Social Contract. The first line of The Social Contract
is the most famous: “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in
chains.” The purpose of the rest of the book was to describe a
society that would instead preserve that freedom.

“The social contract” is an admittedly mythological contract among
individuals to surrender some of their freedoms to ensure a community
which respects the individual and, thereby, preserves as much freedom
as possible. This idea, combined with Locke’s thoughts on
government, were to inspire the founding fathers of the new United
States.

It should be noted, though, that at the end of the book, Rousseau
does prescribe death as the punishment for anyone who, by their
actions, shows that they do not hold the common values of the
community! The French Revolution would show more clearly than the
American what a double-edged sword a philosophy such as Rousseau’s can
be!

Émile was far more sedate. It is a treatise on
child-rearing, from the man who sent his four children to
orphanages! Turns out, though, he had some pretty good advice.

He condemned all forms of education that use force. Instead,
he promoted education that nurtured the natural unfolding of a child’s
potentials. This in a time when it was thought that if you didn’t
beat children regularly with a good sized stick, they would grow up
spoiled! And Nature, he said, is to be the child’s primary
teacher, with freedom to explore the major teaching method.

Basically, he says, the child learns by gradual adaptation to
necessities, and by imitation of those around him. Education
should be primarily moral until the child is twelve, when intellectual
education begins. Religious education should be held off until
the child is 18. This way, the child can develop reasonable
religious beliefs, rather than unthinking acceptance of mythology and
miracles.

The book is beautifully written, but many would say almost naively
idealistic. It would be a great influence in Europe and later in
the United States. Maria Montessori in Italy, for example, based
many of her ideas on Rousseau, as did John Dewey in the US. What
we now call progressive education and learning by doing come basically
from Émile!

The great philosophers of his time laughed at him -- but the clergy
was outraged! Rousseau’s friends warned him and encouraged him to
flee. In 1762, the French parlement ordered all copies of Emile
confiscated and burned. Rousseau fled to Switzerland, only to
have both his books burned in Calvinist Geneva.

He begged Frederic the Great for asylum in Neuchâtel.
There he lived, more eccentric than ever. And yet he was the idol
of women everywhere, and his publishers begged him for more. He
gave them more, primarily in the form of essays or letters to his
critics.

But the local ministers in Neuchâtel were also upset about his
writings, and a local sermon led to an attack on Rousseau’s
house.
He and Therese moved again, to a lone cottage on a tiny island in a
lake
in Switzerland. But he was again ordered to leave, which he did,
first to Strasbourg, then to England at the invitation of David Hume in
1766.

At first in London he was the talk of the town, and everyone wanted
to meet him. But he tired of this quickly and asked Hume to find
him a place in the country. There, Rousseau, Therese, and their
dog Sultan put quite a strain on their hosts’ hospitality.

Rousseau began to read critical articles in the British press.
Already rather paranoid, he responded to them as if there were a
conspiracy against him, and even accused Hume of being a part of
it. He and Therese “escaped” from England back to France.

Although technically still in danger of arrest in France, he
nevertheless enjoyed the reception his fans gave him. But fearing
for his life, he fled into the countryside to wander anonymously.
In 1768, he finally married his Therese.

She begged him to go back to Paris, so they did (under
pseudonyms). There he copied music for a living, and also finally
finished, in 1770, his autobiography.

He continued to write, some of his most beautiful work as well as
some of his most paranoid, until 1778. He had moved into a
cottage offered by the marquis de Girardin, where he happily studied
the local flora, when he suffered a stroke. Therese tried to move
him onto his bed, but he fell again and cut his head. By the time
the Marquis got to him, he was dead.

He was buried on the estate, and his grave become a pilgrimage
site. He was later moved to the Pantheon in Paris, and laid to
rest not far from, of all people, Voltaire.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832

We do not have to visit a madhouse to
find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the
universe. -- Goethe

Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt-am-Main
in Germany, the oldest
of six children -- although only he and a sister survived into
adulthood. His father, Johann Kaspar Goethe, was a well-to-do lawyer
and amateur scholar, but a failure in politics and with an unpleasant
disposition. His mother, Katharina Elisabeth Textor was
considerably more pleasant, and was the daughter of the
bürgermeister (mayor) of Frankfurt.

Young Goethe was a handsome and talented youth, learned languages
easily, and was interested in music and art. He entered the
University of Leipzig to study law, but a disappointment in love led
him to sickness and depression, and he left school. In 1771,
however, he received his law degree from the University of Strasbourg.

His early reading of Bayle's Dictionary led him to renounced
his Christianity as a teenager and become an atheist. He later
mellowed a bit, and adopted a pantheism modeled after Spinoza's.

In 1774, he wrote Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (the Sorrows of
Young Werther), a tragic love story that, though panned by the
critics, was wildly successful, especially among young romantic
intellectuals. The book concludes with a suicide which was,
sadly, imitated by a number of love sick readers. Like many of
his works, the story emphasized the tensions between the nature of the
individual and the restrictions of society.

The following year, he was invited to join the Duke of Saxony-Weimar
at court. At first, he was just an "ornament" there, but later he
performed various real political duties, including inspections of mines
and the establishment of weather observatories.

In 1782, he was inducted into the nobility, which permitted him to
add "von" to his name. Because of his fame and status in Weimar,
he met and befriended a number of young poets, including Schiller and
Herder.

Since his teens, Goethe was given to falling in love, yet apparently
unable to commit himself to one woman or the institution of
marriage. His longest and most intense relationship began around
1775 with Charlotte von Schardt, a married woman who had had seven
children (though only four survived). He would write long and
romantic letters to her for most of his life.

He did eventually set up a household with a young working-class girl
named Christiane Vulpius. She bore a child on Christmas day in
1789.

In 1801, Goethe became quite ill, and his recovered took many
years. Toward the end of his illness, Napoleon defeated the
Prussians at Jena and marched into Weimar. His troops attempted
to take over Goethe's house, and Christiane physically protected
him. He finally married her.

Goethe was a strong admirer of Napoleon, and visited him in 1808 at
the emperor's invitation. Goethe also visited with Beethoven in 1812.

Goethe's greatest work is his two-part play Faust.
Although he began writing it in 1773, it would not be finished until
1831. The first part, however, could stand alone, and it was
completed in 1808. Its theme was human freedom and the power of
passion, which Faust discovers after he wagers his soul in a devil's
bargain with Mephistopheles.

[An interesting aside: Goethe's Faust creates an artificial
man in his laboratory. This influenced a certain Mary Shelley,
author of Frankenstein (perhaps the first science fiction
novel). She even places her story in a 13th century castle she
had seen which belonged to the old (and colorful) German family
Frankenstein, a castle Goethe was also quite familiar with!]

In addition to his poetry, novels, and plays, Goethe spend
considerable time on science. He studied medicine, anatomy,
physics, chemistry, botany, and meteorology.

In 1792, he completed the two part Beiträge zur Optik
(Contributions to Optics), and in 1810 the three part Zur
Farbenlehre (On the Theory of Colors). He truly believed that
it was these works that would be his greatest contributions.
Instead, few scientists approved of them, and they were to make little
serious impact on the field. His work would make an impression on
various artists, though, including Turner, Klee, and Kandinsky.
His approach was really more phenomenological than experimental, and
his work reflected more on the subjective experiences of color and
light than on their physics.

He also wrote a book called The Metamorphosis of Plants,
which suggested that all plants are just variations on a primitive
plant he called the Urpflanze. He coined the term morphology
along the way, and showed the relationship of human beings to animals
with his discovery of the human intermaxillary bone (just above your
upper teeth), just where it is in lower animals.

His wife Christiane died in 1816. His lifelong love Charlotte
died in 1827. The Duke died the following year. And his
last
remaining child died in 1830. Suffering from sickness and
depression, Goethe himself finally died, March 22, 1832, one year after
finishing the second half of his masterpiece Faust.

Arthur Schopenhauer

1788-1860

Arthur Schopenhauer was born February 22, 1788
in Danzig, Prussia
(now Gdansk in Poland). His father was a successful businessman,
and his mother a novelist. Young Arthur was moved around Europe
quite a bit, which allowed him to become fluent in several languages,
and to develop a deep love of nature.

In 1805, his father died, and he tried a business career. He
lived with his mother for a while in Weimar, and she introduced him to
Goethe. He went on to study medicine at the University of
Göttingen and philosophy at the University of Berlin, and
ultimately received his doctorate from the University of Jena in
1813. Later, he worked with Goethe on Goethe's studies on color.

In 1819, he published his greatest work, Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea).

To Schopenhauer, the phenomenal world is basically an
illusion. The true reality, Kant's "thing-in-itself," he refers
to as Will. Will, perhaps an odd term to us today, is
more like the Tao in Chinese philosophy: It is out of the Will
that everything derives. But it has more the qualities of a
force, and pushes or drives what we perceive as the phenomenal world.

Will is, you could say, the inner nature of all things. So, if
you want to understand something's -- or someone's -- inner nature, you
need only look within yourself. So the Will also drives us,
through our instincts. This concept would influence a young
Sigmund Freud a generation later.

Schopenhauer, profoundly influenced by his reading of Buddhist
literature, saw life as essentially painful. We are forced by our
natures, our instincts, to live, to breed, to suffer, and to die.
Schopenhauer is often described as "the great pessimist!"

For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the
tormented souls and on the other the devils in it....

If you imagine... the sum total of distress, pain, and suffering
of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to
admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call
up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon....

To our amazement we suddenly exist, after having for countless
millennia not existed; in a short while we will again not exist, also
for countless millennia. That cannot be right, says the heart.

The question, of course, is how does one get past this suffering?
One way he recommends is esthetic salvation -- seeing the
beauty
in something, or someone. When we do this, we are actually
looking
at the universal or essence behind the scene, which moves us in turn
towards the universal subject within ourselves. This quiets the
will that forces us into the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer
believed that music was the purest art -- one step from will.

A second way to transcend suffering is through ethical salvation
-- compassion. Here, too, it is the recognition of self-in-others
and others-in-self that leads to a quieting of the will.

But these are only partial answers. The full answer requires religious
salvation -- asceticism, the direct stilling of all desires by a
life of self-denial and meditation. Without the will, only
nothingness remains, which is Nirvana.

Schopenhauer lived many years of his life a bitter and reclusive
man, unable to deal with his lack of success in life. He began
publishing his works again in 1836, and intellectuals all over Europe
began to develop an interest in him.

Sadly, Schopenhauer developed heart problems and on September 21,
1860, he died. After his death, he would powerfully influence
such notables as the composer Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thomas Mann and many other writers.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

1813-1855

There are, as is known, insects that die
in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest,
most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death. --
Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 5, 1813, the
youngest of seven children. His father, Michael Pedersen
Kierkegaard, was in the hosiery business. He was a powerful man
who held to a particularly gloomy Christianity, obsessed with guilt
over having once cursed God. His mother was Ane
Sørensdatter Lund, a servant of the Kierkegaard's.

Two of Søren's brothers and two of his sisters died. By
1834, his mother had died as well, and Kierkegaard became nearly as
depressed as his father. He lost his faith and turned to a
hedonistic life-style, but had a religious experience in 1838. He
received his theology degree in 1840, and proposed to Regine Olsen,
daughter of a prominent Copenhagen government official.

No one knows precisely why, but in late 1841, he broke off the
engagement, which lead to considerable negative social press. It
seems to have been the pivotal crisis in his life, and he abruptly left
to Berlin to study.

When he returned, he finished a manuscript he had been working on,
and in 1843 published Either/Or. It takes the form of an
argument about how to live life between an "aesthetic" man and an
"ethical" man -- very probably reflecting two aspects of Kierkegaard's
own soul.

The aesthetic man is basically a hedonist and an atheist.
Although he is portrayed as a refined gentleman, his sections of the
book are rambling, suggesting that his life is likewise without
focus. The ethical man is a judge, and his arguments are far more
orderly and eloquent: He spends considerable time analyzing the
ancient Roman emperor Nero and his mental states.

Also in 1843, he published his famous book Fear and Trembling,
which retells the story of Abraham and his near-sacrifice of his
son. This time, Kierkegaard compares the ethical response -- it
is clearly wrong to kill one's own son -- with a religious response,
which is reflected in Abraham's faith in his God.

In his various books, Kierkegaard develops his three "stages" or
competing life philosophies: The aesthetic person, who
lives in the moment and lacks commitment; the ethical
person, who is in fact committed to his ideals; and the religious
person, who recognizes the transcendent nature of true ideals.
Notice the similarity to Schopenhauer, although for Schopenhauer
"aesthetic" refers to a love of art and music, not hedonism.

Throughout his work, he was concerned with passions.
He defined anxiety, for example, as "the dizziness of freedom."Despair
is what the hedonist feels when he finally recognized the emptiness of
his life. Guilt is what the ethical man feels when he
inevitably discovers his inability to forgive himself. These
definitions would profoundly influence a number of later philosophers
and writers.

In 1849, he published Sickness unto Death, which was his
strongest call to the conventional Christians of Copenhagen to take
what Kierkegaard called "a leap of faith" into a more personal
kind of religion. But his community is not quite ready for this
passionate brand of Christianity, and he was severely criticized by the
religious powers of Denmark.

Kierkegaard is often considered the first existentialist, mostly
because of the way he used the word existence. He said
that God doesn't exist because he is eternal. Only people exist,
because they are always an unfinished product. And the nature of
existence is, first, that it is the domain of the individual, and
second, that individual must take responsibility for his or her own
creation.

But Kierkegaard noted that his was not a "system" of
philosophy. Human existence is an ongoing process of
creation, and cannot be encompassed by any "system." This has
been a central theme in existentialism ever since.

Kierkegaard died on October 2, 1855, of spinal paralysis. He
would not take communion, and he asked that no clergy participate in
his funeral. His epitaph reads "The Individual."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

I fear animals regard man as a creature
of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its
healthy animal reason-as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the
weeping animal, as the unhappy animal. -- Nietzsche

Second only to Rousseau in the impact he had on Psychology is
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. He was born in Röcken, in
Prussia Saxony, on October 15, 1844, named after Friedrich Wilhelm IV,
King of Prussia, who had the same birthday. Nietzsche's father
was a minister -- one of many in the family -- who had tutored several
members of the royal family. His mother was a puritanical
housewife.

When Friedrich was 18, he lost his faith -- which would remain a
central issue for the rest of his life. And he said his life was
changed as well by his reading of Schopenhauer a few years later while
a student at the University of Leipzig.
When he was 23, he was drafted into the Prussian army -- but he fell
off a horse, hurt his chest, and was released.

He received an appointment as professor of philology (classical
languages and literature) at the University of Basel at the tender age
of 24, a year before he received his Ph.D. Near Basel lived the
famous Richard Wagner, and Nietzsche was invited to Christmas dinner in
1869. Wagner’s grandiose and romantic operas were to influence
Nietzsche’s view of life for some time to come.

He served a brief stint as a volunteer medical orderly during the
Franco-Prussian War, during which he contracted diphtheria and
dysentery, which damaged his health permanently.

After returning to Basel, he published his first book in 1872 --
inspired by Wagner -- called The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit
of Music. It was in this book that he introduced the contrast
of the Dionysian and Apollonian. Dionysus was the
god of wine and revelry, living for the moment. Apollo was the
god of peace, order, and art. The one lacks discipline, but the
other lacks, as we would say today, soul.

In 1879, because of his seriously deteriorating health, he was
forced to retire from teaching. He published Human, All Too Human
-- an analysis of emotion -- in parts from 1878 through 1880.
During this time also, he fell in love, although briefly, with the
famous Lou Salomé (later a confident of Sigmund Freud’s!).

Heartbroken, and perhaps recognizing that he was destined for
bachelorhood, he retired high into the Alps to write his master work, Thus
Spake Zarathustra, published in 1883 through 1885. Here, he
made a heroic effort at addressing the pessimism of Schopenhauer.
Nietzsche felt that religion had failed miserably to provide man with
meaning. So now that God was “dead,” we needed to stop looking to the
skies and start providing that missing meaning ourselves.
The people he saw as having accomplished this transition he called “Über-menschen,”
usually translated as supermen. But, he notes, supermen have not
arrived as yet, and we must be satisfied to serve as a bridge to that
future.

The book is a masterpiece by any standard, yet Nietzsche remained an
unknown. His health continuing to deteriorate, he was cared for
by
his sister, Lisbeth Förster-Nietzsche. She, however, married
an anti-semite who Nietzsche abhorred and moved to a commune in
Paraguay!

Nietzsche then lived in various rooming houses all over Italy and
Switzerland. His eyesight went from bad to worse, and his
headaches overwhelmed him. He stopped writing books and instead
wrote aphorisms (short comment), which he then collected into books.

Beyond Good and Evil (the best introduction to his ideas)
came
out in 1886, and The Geneology of Morals in 1887. In these
books,
he makes clear his great distinction between Herren-Moral and Herden-Moral,
that is, the morality of lords and the morality of the herd.

The morality of the herd is what he calls traditional
Judeo-Christian morality: It is, he says, an ethic of
helplessness and fear. With this morality, we keep the powerful
and talented under control by appealing to virtues such as altruism and
egalitarianism. Secretly, it is, like all motives, a “will to
power” -- but a sly, manipulative one. We cry “I am weaker than
you, but I am still better than you!”

The morality of lords, on the other hand, is based on the manly
virtues of courage, honor, power, and the love of danger. It is
pagan, western, teutonic. The only rule, he said, is do not
betray a friend.

Although he was not anti-semitic, his choice of words would lead the
Nazis to use some of them in ways he never intended many years after
his
death. Ask yourself if the masses of people shouting “Heil
Hitler!” and the acts of rounding up minority civilians for work camps
and slaughter in any way make you think of courage and honor!

The contrast between these two moralities is in fact a very
productive one:

Nietzsche become increasingly ill and bitter, blind and
paranoid. In Turin in January of 1889 he had attempted to protect
a horse that was being whipped when he suffered an apoplectic stroke
(just like Rousseau) which sent him to an asylum. Some believe
his collapse was the result of syphilis, but it could just as well have
been due to years of medication. His mother claimed him and took care
of him until she died in 1897, when his sister, now back in Germany,
took him in.

He was seldom lucid after that. He died August 25, 1900 at the
age of 55, of stroke and pneumonia.

A number of his works were published after his collapse, including The
Will to Power in 1889, which is a collection of aphorisms found in
his notebooks, and his autobiography Ecce Homo in 1908. Ecce
Homo illustrates both his brilliance and his insanity very
dramatically. Freud called him the most brilliant psychologist
who ever lived.

Romanticism in General

Beneath all the variety represented by the Romantics lies a common
theme: Passion. While the empiricists were concerned with
sensory data, and the rationalists were concerned with reason, the
romantics looked at consciousness and saw first and foremost its
dynamics, purposefulness, striving, desire... passion!

Goethe has Faust say, ''Gefülte is Alles."
Feeling is everything!

In fact, they saw passion in all life, as a basic category... life
as a Darwinian struggle, not just to survive, but to overcome. As
such, it could be called instinct; but in humanity, it goes further,
and involves an overcoming of nature itself.

"The only reality is this: The will of every center of
power to become stronger -- not self-preservation, but the desire to
appropriate, to become master, to become more, to become stronger,"
said Nietzsche.

Along with their love of passion came an impatience with, even
disgust at, the mediocre, the weak, the irresponsible, the
unpassionate.

The romantic's view of the world is a reflection of their view of
humanity: The world is rich, full of qualities -- color, sound,
flavor, feeling -- thick, you might say, and not the thin, gray, empty
thing as pictured by modern science. They tended to ignore
metaphysical speculation as an intellectual game. And for
Schopenhauer, passion became the basic form of all reality: a
universe pressing to be realized.

A passionate metaphysics requires a passionate epistemology (as
opposed to an intellectual or empirical one). First, there is a
preference for intuition or insight: As Pascal put it, "the
heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of." A holistic
understanding is more satisfying than logical, analytical, or
experimental explanations. The world is too big for those and has
to be embraced rather than picked apart.

And the importance of the subjective is emphasized. All
experience is subjective as well as objective. This is a sort of
"uncertainty principle" that applies to all sciences, and philosophy,
and certainly psychology. Objectivity is simply a meaningless
goal. So subjectivity is not something to eliminate, but to
understand.

Hence we must go back to life as it is lived, the Lebenswelt.
We must study whole, meaningful experiences. We might want to go
back to ordinary people, perhaps children or primitives, to understand
the lived world before it is tainted by our perpetual
intellectualization. These tendencies would eventually lead to
phenomenology and related methodologies.

Last (and far from least), we must have a passionate morality.
The romantics tend to admire the heroic, taking a stand against nature,
against the mediocre, against nothingness or meaninglessness. To
some extent, the heroic is closely tied to futility: It is often
Quixotic, or picaresque. There is an affection for the foolish or
unconventional.

Romantic morality is more stoic than epicurean. Meaning, as
expressed by virtue, purpose, and courage, is the highest value, not
pleasure or happiness as we usually conceive of them.

Some romantics are suspicious of Asian philosophy to the extent that
it represents surrender. Nietzsche, among them, considers even
the
Judeo-Christian tradition "Asian" and weak. Their suspicion is
not
entirely well-founded: In traditions such as Taoism and Zen
Buddhism, for example, "surrender" is valued precisely for the strength
it imparts, as demonstrated physically in judo ("gentle way").
Schopenhauer understood this, and his work is clearly colored by
Buddhism in particular.

A passionate morality requires freedom, which Goethe considered the
greatest happiness, and which was quickly disappearing from empiricist,
rationalist, and even religious philosophy. I have to be free to
take that courageous stand; to be determined is to be nothing at all.

A little Buddhism sneaks in when Nietzsche speaks of amor fati,
love of fate: When choices are taken from you, you can still
conquer the moment with your attitude.

Nietzsche said "God is dead!" Now, anything
goes. You don't have to do anything. Be nice?
Why? Be selfish? Why? As Sartre put it, we are
"condemned" to freedom. Even when we choose to allow ourselves to
be determined, it is our choice. Even Kierkegaard asks us to take
a leap of faith that has no justification. So, we have nothing to
lean on, no crutch, no "opiate," no excuses.

Freedom means responsibility. We create ourselves, or better,
we overcome ourselves, or at least we should. Others just play
out
their "programs." Freedom requires that we be truly aware, fully
conscious. It requires that we be fully feeling, that we not deny
but experience our passion. It requires that we be active,
involved.

Freedom means creativity, and the romantic prefers the artist over
the scientist. These ideas are the foundation for the concept of
self-actualization.

The heirs of the romantics are the phenomenologists,
existentialists, and humanists of today.